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Thread: Just after midday, 100 years ago today, Airship R.34 set off from RAF Howden on a training & test flight following repairs/mods, her 1st flight for months. Crew incl. 8 trainee navigation officers and her new captain of 6 days Fl Lt Hadley V. Drew #R34100
In addition to inadequate charts, inexperienced officers & incomplete mooring equipment, the crew were to discover, too late, a faulty wavemeter in their vital radio equipment, perhaps the most important factor in what was to follow #R34100
Also no one had informed the crew that the call sign that would be used to contact them during the flight had, in fact, been changed, a mistake only realised later by the duty signaller at Howden.
Aha, I found an answer to this question I asked previously (but raised initially by @CardingtonSheds I think?) about the fate of Wopsie, the kitten mascot aboard the airship R.34’s record breaking double Atlantic crossing in July 1919. #R34100 Thread follows...
I just received, through the post, a batch of (this week’s guest publication) ‘Dirigible’, the Journal of the Airship Heritage Trust @Airshipsonline. No. 85 from Autumn 2018 has a feature on Fl. Lt. ‘Rex’ Durrant AFC, chief Wireless Officer on the R.34 Atlantic flights #R34100
It provides a summary of Durrant’s career extracted from a scrapbook donated to AHT by his step-grandson. There are press clippings of a reunion of surviving R.34 crew organised by Durrant on 13th July 1949, 30 years to the day that R34 completed her recordbreaking trip #R34100
Although this account is all about airship R.34's fabulous record-breaking flight centenary #R34100, the R.34 was a 'class R33 airhship' named, obviously, after her sister-ship the R.33 which had her maiden flight at Barlow, N. Yorkshire, on March 8th 1919, 6 days before R.34's. 
Encouraged by @SheilaMossKing at the @PennoyerCentre by Pulham's former airship station in Norfolk, my R.34 account is acknowledging the 94th anniversary today of the day that R.33 accidentally broke free from the Pulham mooring tower and came close to wrecking at sea.
At 09:50 on 16 April 1925, the R33 was torn from the mast at Pulham during a gale, and was carried away with only a partial crew of 20 men on board. Her nose partially collapsed and the first gas cell deflated leaving her low in the bow.
So, a family trip on Friday to visit Glasgow’s Riverside Transport Museum, with a side objective of checking out if there is anything on display related to the airships constructed a few miles up the Clyde by William Beardmors & Co at Inchinnan in Renfrewshire #R34100
However, despite the Museum being a fascinating place to visit, there’s nothing on display about Glasgow’s contribution to airship manufacture & surprisingly little about air transport in general. The focus is very much on mass transport, motor cars & sea travel.
But I did find a couple of lateral links to R.34. Firstly, I spotted this superb Beardmore Precision motorbike & sidecar from 1922. Turns out William Beardmore took over the FE Baker Precision m/cycle firm in 1919, manufacturing continuing in the original Birmingham works.
A splendid spent today at @NtlMuseumsScot National Museum of Flight, the former RNAS airship base where HM Airship R.34 was stationed. A veritable cornucopia of #R34100 delights to see there, including this memorial plaque for R.34’s Atlantic crossings
Also delighted to see one of the RNAS airship and aeroplane station’s gates and, behind it, some original panels of glass from the rigid airship shed windows. Tinted glass was used to prevent sunlight causing photolytic degradation of the airships’ outer skin
